It’s during recovery following hard training that the body makes the changes that improves our performance in a race or in training. These changes can result in fat-burning enzyme increases, decreases in body fat, increase the ability of the heart to pump more blood (increased heart stroke volume) stronger muscles and tendons, and more glycogen stored in the body. After hard exercise, the focus should be on recovery, and this is the most important thing you can do in training to perform at higher levels. But this is the part of training that most of us get wrong. We don’t recover enough and end up burning out or not reaching our full potentials.
1. Weekly recovery. Each week there should be hard and easy days. We can't train hard every day with no recovery breaks and perform to the highest level when needed, not even elite athletes can do it without recovery.
2. Monthly recovery. You must recover at least every third or fourth week, but the recommendation is after every two weeks of hard work efforts
3. Yearly recovery. After race periods you must recover and rest, we call these “Transition” periods and the purpose of these low volume, low intensity periods is to allow your body to rebuild and your mind to rejuvenate before starting another period of hard training.
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